This is a great article! There are so many options right now on the market that is overwhelming. Do you by chance know about eClincher? That’s what I’m using right now. I’ve recently decided to subscribe, but I’m still looking for opinions. Right now I feel it’s a great tool with an awesome pricing. However I don’t seem to get many reviews on it. Hope to hear back from you!
If you want to explore your social media analytics, schedule posts across platforms, and monitor engagement, Sprout Social is a great all-in-one social media management tool. The platform allows you to analyze your social media data beyond the built-in analytics offered by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also track engagement on keywords and hashtags, identify influencers, build custom dashboards, and more. Sprout integrates with all major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+), as well as other systems including Bitly and Google Analytics.
Did you know the average person spends 4 years looking down at their cell phone over a lifetime? To be honest, I’m somewhat surprised it’s not even more (but I suspect this number to increase). As I glanced around my family room on Christmas evening I noticed every one of my family members scrolling through their social feeds, excluding my nephew; he’s 6 months old, but oddly always gravitates towards the iPhone (although it’s typically just an attempt to eat it).
Zoho Social has many of the same tools and features that the other platforms have, but they also have Facebook lead ads, advanced reporting features, a SocialShare browser plugin, and CRM integrations. Zoho Social caters to agencies as well so marketers have the choice of choosing between the business or agency plans. Pricing for the paid plans ranges from $8.33 to $125+ for larger agencies. Zoho Social’s free plan allows you to manage 1 brand, and includes the URL shortener and SocialShare browser plugin.
Social Media Marketing brings new rules and opportunities to increase the awareness, profitability, and overall lifeline of your brand. A further understanding of your consumers, how they communicate, the experiences they’re looking to have, and where they’re located digitally is crucial. Your social media strategy will affect the chances of winning new customers, retaining current customers, future business expansion opportunities, talented employees, and better products. But don’t take the short way out. If at first you don’t succeed, don’t give up. Stray away from being comfortable and what’s safe. Social media is a marathon, not a sprint.
In-Depth Analytics: Many SMMS are capable of providing users with metrics on social media accounts, data from which can be integrated into a company’s social media and brand strategies. Such metrics can also be used to link social media strategies to a business’ website. They can keep tabs on how marketing campaigns are doing, which can provide valuable insights into a company’s social media presence.
The latest edition to our favorite social media management tools list is more than just a tool, it’s our very own new social network for content creators! DashBurst is a new multimedia web experience, social network, dashboard and blogging platform. You can explore and share a variety of different content including text, photos, video, audio, articles, infographics, docs, the web and any other media with just one simple Burst! You can also schedule and queue unlimited Bursts for later and watch them automatically get published to your DashBurst and other social media channels simultaneously, saving you time so that you can continue creating or just relax. On top of all that, you can create Boards to curate and showcase interesting content like your own works, must-read articles or anything you else you love too!

No matter how far and wide your business intends to extend its reach, successful content marketing distribution often comes down to having a strategic, systematic, and scalable approach. Our model is one way to ensure that everyone involved with your content is working from the same blueprint, but it’s not the only way to get the job done. Let us know what processes you use to determine where, when, and how you share your content and spread your brand influence.

Like objectives, campaigns have a result or goal that you are shooting for. For example, say one of your business objectives for the year is to generate 100 new customers. You could then plan out four specific campaigns over the year with each campaign goal to generate 25 new customers. That way, each campaign would serve its purpose of building toward your yearly goal.
If you want your audience to stay engaged, you need to be engaging. One great way to do this is to create social campaigns that run across all your social platforms. The important thing to note here is that anyone can run a contest or create a social campaign, so you need to make yours stand out by adding a charitable, inspirational, or emotional component. Any element that pulls at the heart strings works well. If your company already is involved with volunteer work, which many are, then this is one great way to inspire and engage your followers. I know what you’re thinking, it seems somewhat morally corrupt to use a charity relationship for marketing purposes, but on the other hand you’re promoting that organization and encouraging more people to get involved. So how do you apply this across several channels? Start by…
Solutions aid organizations with the way they participate in important social media conversations. These conversations include blogs and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, along with other forms of online communities. These tools are also imbued with new listening technologies, through which businesses can learn how people view their organizations. These functionalities accurately describes the true definition of social management software.

You'll be able to set up Queries and Rules within the social tool suite to see if it produces the data that you determined was needed at the outset. If one tool doesn't produce the data the way you need to see it, then try another. Here's a link to a LinkedIn Boolean search primer. Several of the platforms reviewed have strong pureplay analytics enhanced with a Boolean search option, including Brandwatch Analytics, Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio, and Talkwalker. It's necessary for anyone using them to have a reasonably strong command of Boolean scripting.

Scheduling: Social media management software gives the user a chance to plan and organize their social media activities, posts and other contents. It allows the business to schedule their posts and be able to post them when their target audience is most likely to view them. It certainly makes it easy for the user to know what to post and when by keeping an accurate calendar.
These posts can be one or more of the following: images, photo sets, animated GIFs, video, audio, and text posts. For the users to differentiate the promoted posts to the regular users' posts, the promoted posts have a dollar symbol on the corner. On May 6, 2014, Tumblr announced customization and theming on mobile apps for brands to advertise.[78]
The activity of tracking social media channels. Organizations measure and use social media analytics tools to find out where are the discussions about them, their competition and other topics of interest. Social media monitoring includes measuring opinions and sentiment of groups and influencers. It includes historical data and other information. The goal is to assess the reputation and be alerted to significant events taking place in social channels. — Dreamgrow

Use Buzzsumo to find content that resonates. I just started using this tool recently, but I’ve already added it to my bookmark bar and am completely addicted. It’s the easiest way to search related industry news sites and blogs, keywords, influencers, etc. to find the content with the highest number of social shares. Study the headlines that were shared and re-share those articles/headlines with your followers. This will continue the train of sharing, but also show your followers that your social posts are intriguing and follow-worthy

Inaccurate Automated Sentiment Analysis: Most SMMS generate reports about customer sentiments. Such reports are often proved inaccurate despite vendor assurance. Depending on these reports could severely impact a company’s appraisal of customer sentiments. Plus, it is easy to miss valuable social media insights from the use of automatically generated sentiment analysis.

Please note: You don’t have to one of the most recognized fashion brands in the world (like Marc Jacobs is) to make this work for your brand. For example let’s say you run an athletic clothing store and offer free yoga classes at several of your store fronts – this would be a great actionable movement to brand and spread across their channels. Use the inspirational aspect of getting fit, New Year’s resolutions, healthy living, or whichever angle you believe your customers would gravitate towards. Test out a few hashtags, find the one that resonates best, and brand your movement by announcing it on your blog and social channels.
Gone are the days when social media marketing was all about increasing your followers. An early sign of success was seeing your followers grow from one day to another. Nowadays, social media marketing has left behind the ages of innocence to go through a more mature phase. This should not be a bad change, but we still need to keep up with the shift.
It also costs time to create snackable content and execute a full-blown strategy. So what's the solution for a budget-conscious business? First, enlist the help of social media tools to tackle virtually every aspect of your social media marketing, from content to advertising to lead generation, social listening, analytics, and more. Second, keep those social efforts organized. Using a spreadsheet or custom content promotion template can ensure you're maximizing every opportunity.
That said, Facebook can be an incredibly powerful way to use social media for advertising. It’s a database of information that you can use to deliver targeted ads to your ideal customers. If you amplify content that’s set up to produce engagement (likes, shares, comments) such as a viral video, you can generally lower the cost of your advertising, so keep that in mind.

Publishing & RSS – Buffer has the basic publishing features such as scheduling and adding posts to a queue but it is not made for evergreen posts. Meaning, it will not let you upload hundreds of posts and then recycle them, or publish them on your social media until you tell it to stop. It does have the RSS feed that helps you publish posts from blogs.

Canva is a graphic design program that makes creating professional graphics and presentations easy — no graphic designer experience required. With Canva, you can create a social media graphic (at any size or dimension) using your own images or any of the millions of themes, graphics, icons, and fonts in Canva’s arsenal. You can also save your creations if you want to make a recurring series using the same branding.
The easiest way to view social media management is to consider that it includes 3 major social media disciplines: social listening, social analytics and social engagement. Social listening is when you gather everything that is being said about your brand. Social analytics help you understand all the social media chatter and relate it to possible business changes. Social engagement is the act of interacting, usually 1-on-1 but occasionally at scale, with customers over social channels. Most businesses take on social engagement to close the loop with customers on their issues.
Aside from this, SMMS can help businesses where team collaboration is required. Shared inboxes are a common thing with SMMS systems, allowing individuals to send messages to the right people. Such software also help provide brand security by allowing but trusted staff to send messages to corporate social profiles. Inappropriate messages sent are easily tracked and can be dealt with accordingly. In the same manner, unauthorized content that can adversely impact a brand can also be prevented.
TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. TweetDeck interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. It was the most popular Twitter application with a 23% market share as of June 2009, following only the official Twitter website with 45.7% share for posting new status updates.
This is a question we often get asked at LYFE Marketing, which is great, because we have the answer! You’re probably familiar with social media channels like Facebook or Twitter. But are you may familiar with how these channels are used to grow your small business? Identifying what is social media management to your business plays an important role in using social channels effectively to grow your reach and influence conversions.
Whether you are a user handling multiple accounts, or an agency that handles hundreds, HootSuite makes it easy. It’s easy to add accounts, easy to schedule posts across all major platforms and easy to add account managers. In addition, the company also has a robust training platform that teaches not just the tools, but how to think about social marketing as a whole. As a package, the best out there for the price. - David Kley, Web Design and Company
Social media presents brands with a massive opportunity to learn about their audience through social listening. The nature of social media means sharing information publicly, which is great for marketers doing research. By monitoring conversations, sentiments, and mentions, you can get a good idea of how your audience feels about a particular topic.
Who is going to create your content? Who is going to maintain your social media accounts? Who is going to respond to questions and be the face of your business online? Do you have the technical ability in-house to join the online conversation? If not, are you willing to learn? Can you or someone who works with you write well? You need to be sure you have the necessary people in place to execute a social media marketing plan before you start.

Rob Watts is PCMag's Business Analyst, writing reviews and features for a variety of business applications. He brings years of experience in editorial insights to the role, having previously worked as an editor for Keypoint Intelligence, an independent test laboratory for document imaging hardware and software. He spends his free time cooking and g... See Full Bio

The latest edition to our favorite social media management tools list is more than just a tool, it’s our very own new social network for content creators! DashBurst is a new multimedia web experience, social network, dashboard and blogging platform. You can explore and share a variety of different content including text, photos, video, audio, articles, infographics, docs, the web and any other media with just one simple Burst! You can also schedule and queue unlimited Bursts for later and watch them automatically get published to your DashBurst and other social media channels simultaneously, saving you time so that you can continue creating or just relax. On top of all that, you can create Boards to curate and showcase interesting content like your own works, must-read articles or anything you else you love too!

Statusbrew is a social media management platform that combines the power of internet and technology to empowers businesses, brands, marketing agencies, and organizations to discover and manage customer experience across various social touch-points and drive growth. Statusbrew bridges the gap between businesses and customers by unearthing deep insights of social media analytics. Trusted by over 16 million users worldwide, Statusbrew makes it fast and easy for individuals, small and medium businesses and organizations of every scale and complexity to efficiently manage social media properties. Get in full control of all your channels on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus with the complete suite of social media management tools on Statusbrew. With a simple to use interface for the planning of social publishing of marketing and PR campaigns on multiple social networks, Statusbrew is a trusted partner for Teams. With Audience on Statusbrew businesses, influencers and individuals alike gather social intelligence to engage with their community on different social networks and nurture strong relationships with people who matter the most. The social audience can be segmented and managed for well-girded growth to maximize returns by keeping their valuable connections happy at every step of their social journey. Track and monitor your competitors alike, and grow fast using our Lead Generation process using Twitter Sources. With Engage on Statusbrew, never miss out any conversation about your brand or business on social. Reply to DMs, Mentions, and Comments from all the profiles in a single unified social inbox. With real-time sync, receive and assign replies to specific teammates for them to work on it as soon as a prospect talks about you and never miss out on any lead. Slack Integration will change the way Brands and Agencies can bring in their teams to collaborate in Social Publishing and Brand Monitoring right from their workspace. When you connect your Statusbrew with one or more Slack channels or workplaces, you would receive instant Slack notifications for all the activities you choose are important for your Business. Our powerful white-labeled Reports give you, your team and clients, powerful week-over-week and month-over-month Analytics to get the best ROI on your marketing efforts. Signup on Statusbrew for a free 14 days trial to gain a competitive edge and build strong social connections!

You’ve probably wondered: What type of posts are a “hit” with my audience? Which ones get the most shares and engagement? How do I get more leads through social channels? Thankfully, with a dashboard, you can stop the guesswork. By seeing what your audience clicked on, you can fine-tune into what your followers enjoy. Dashboards make it easy to analyze everything at once.

Since social media marketing first came to be, strategists and markets have been getting smarter and more careful with the way they go about collecting information and distributing advertisements. With the presence of data collecting companies, there is no longer a need to target specific audiences. This can be seen as a large ethical gray area. For many users, this is a breach of privacy, but there are no laws that prevent these companies from using the information provided on their websites. Companies like Equifax, Inc., TransUnion Corp, and LexisNexis Group thrive on collecting and sharing personal information of social media users.[112] In 2012, Facebook purchased information from 70 million households from a third party company called Datalogix. Facebook later revealed that they purchased the information in order to create a more efficient advertising service.[113]
Social media is rapidly becoming a resource for customer care. Gone are the days when customers would wait in a long line with the hope of resolution or were willing to stay on hold for extended periods of time until they could be helped. On social media, they know that the world is watching. Customers know that brands are likely to quickly resolve their issues if they publicly ask for assistance. For many businesses, this can pose issues since they most likely rely on a marketing team to run their social media management initiatives.
Now, look at social media through the same lens. Social media spending in the U.S. alone is expected to increase to more than $17 billion in 2019. A dizzily impressive figure, no doubt, but that kind of budget makes sense when you look at just how important social is to the way companies engage with their audiences, amplify their content marketing, and measure their successes. In fact, “The State of Digital Media” found that 66 percent of publication editors determine content success based on the number of social shares each piece yields.
In any such scenario, you should focus on looking beyond. In other words, start researching into their online behavior and what makes them tick. Try to understand how and where your ideal customers are spending most of their time. And above all, how they’re socializing on various social networks. This data would be crucial to improve your social media marketing.

I encourage you to think of ways you can use your social channels to tell motivational stories to your viewers. They don’t need to be rooted in charity. For example if you sell B2B software you could share stories from your happiest clients on your blog and then create a social campaign with a unique slogan and hashtag to promote and create a movement around their stories.
Social Media Management and Analytics Software provides a platform for social media monitoring, engagement measures and brand value by measuring , analyzing and interpreting interactions and associations between people, topics and ideas. Social media analytics uncovers customer sentiment dispersed across countless online sources. Social media analytics is often called Social Media Listening or Online Listening and the analytics allow marketers to identify sentiment and identify trends in order to better meet their customers need.
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AgoraPulse: An SMMS designed to aid businesses in managing their social network profiles, AgoraPulse can enable enterprises to handle their social media accounts across many platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, among others. The software offers ease of use and excellent customer support. To maintain businesses’ social media relations and establish new ones, AgoraPulse ensures that no tweet, message or comment goes unread. It also provides tools that enable users to collect statistics and reports that can be used to come up with effective social media campaigns, giving businesses an edge over competitors. Numerous tools embedded in the application include Facebook apps, analytics and those that allow content automation. Users receive notifications about comments, tweets and messages, all on inboxes provided by the app. This feature provides access to conversations and therefore, a chance to expand.
For many small businesses, there just isn’t enough time or resources to dedicate to effective social media management. Posting quality content consistently takes a lot of time and effort that some small business marketing teams just don’t have. Not to mention, you may not have anyone on your team with the expertise or skills needed to implement effective campaigns.
YouTube is the number one place for creating and sharing video content, and it can also be an incredibly powerful social media marketing tool. Many businesses try to create video content with the aim of having their video “go viral,” but in reality those chances are pretty slim. Instead, focus on creating useful, instructive “how-to” videos. These how-to videos also have the added benefit of ranking on the video search results of Google, so don't under-estimate the power of video content!
Twitter analytics was made available to all members some time ago now. It is a simple but useful tool to assess how you are doing on Twitter, and unlike the previous tools I have mentioned all the functionality is available for free, rather than it being a ‘Freemium’ service. It gives you a decent pallet of stats, such as profile visits, mentions, followers and tweet impressions. And you can see how these are changing month to month. It also shows you your top performing tweets for each month, which is great for assessing what goes down well with your audience.
Have you ever looked through the people you follow on Twitter or Pinterest? You probably see about .05% of things they tweet or pin. I’m grabbing this metric out of thin air, but since everyone who’s anyone is on social media, even if you are posting regularly your followers are probably not very engaged with your brand. The number of people following you can only take you so far. “Twitter is sort of like the ‘live TV’ of social media,” according to Marketing Land’s Danny Sullivan. “If you’re not tuned in to catch a particular tweet live, then you’ve missed it.” This doesn’t apply just for Twitter, the reach of Facebook’s organic posts has drastically dropped making it much more difficult for brands to stand out, even if you’re following their page (we’ll get into this more in tip #3)…
Competitive analysis will play a big role in your program so make sure the tools you choose can perform here. It's also important that your tool has good social listening ability, too. In other words, make sure it can pick up and deliver any mentions, conversations, hashtags, tweets, and other chatter about your company. Of the products covered in this review roundup, Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio, Sysomos, and Talkwalker stand out as frontrunners in enterprise-scale listening capabilities for global brands, including providing detailed sentiment analysis and data visualizations.

This ties in nicely with the tip above because there are likely several industry influencers participating in your industry related chats. Not having any luck with chats? Luckily there are tons of other strategies you can use on social to get connected with big shots in your industry. The goal is to get these people to like you and like your brand, and I’m not talking about a Facebook like. I’m talking about a genuine emotional feeling of liking everything your business is about. Why? Once you get the in with the people that matter, your business will only continue to grow because their audience and authority with mesh with yours to cast an even wider net. Take the following four steps to socially connect with your influencers:

Insert some personality, humor, and spunk into your brand. Remember, social media has the word “social” in it for a reason. Yes, some use platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to gather industry-related or world news, but more often than not social media is used to entertain and kill time. Your marketing messages need to adjust accordingly because if you’re using the same copy that you’re using in, let’s say search or email marketing, then your followers are going to remain oblivious to your brand. BarkBox, one of the trending box delivery services on the market, which caters exclusively to adorable doggies, is one company to take note of. Founded in 2011, BarkBox has done an impressive job of growing their business in a short time frame, with a large chunk of their marketing focusing on growing and creating engaging social content. Their Facebook page is hysterically entertaining, with each post featuring an adorable pup and tagline as if the dog was actually speaking to the reader. This works because it’s a. adorable b. hysterical and c. relatable. Just check out this post below with almost 3,000 likes, 42 comments, and 170 shares after just 9 hours. This massive amount of interactions and shares not only establishes brand authority, but also drastically increases chances of this post showing up on a friend’s newsfeed (therefore gaining brand awareness, followers, leads, and customers).
Individual reports and scheduling posts for individual channels are always helpful, but that is not always a sufficient representation of your online image. I like Raven because it provides reports gathering information from pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), and social media channels. It also allows you to access data and schedule posts on a wide variety of digital media channels. - Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing